Franz Welser-Möst

The Austrian conductor Franz Welser-Möst, who was born in 1960 in Linz, has served as music director of The Cleveland Orchestra since 2002, a position he will hold until 2027. In addition to leading concerts at Severance Hall and the Blossom Music Center, he and the orchestra perform in residencies across the United States, Europe, and China. Prior to his tenure in Cleveland, Welser-Möst held chief positions with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (1990–1996) and Zurich Opera, where he was active from 1995 to 2008. From 2010 to 2014, he served as General Music Director of the Vienna Staatsoper. He maintains a close collaboration with the Vienna Philharmonic and conducted its prestigious New Year’s Concert in 2011, 2013, and 2023. He has also led the orchestra on tours across the United States, Japan, China, and Australia. In 2024, the Vienna Philharmonic named him an Honorary Member. In the 2024-25 season, Welser-Möst conducts the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. This evening, he makes his debut with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. He is also a regular guest at the Salzburg Festival, where in recent years he has led new productions of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Die Liebe der Danae, Salome, and Elektra; Beethoven’s Fidelio; Reimann’s Lear; and Puccini’s Il trittico. Welser-Möst has received numerous awards for his recordings, including the Gramophone Award, Diapason d’or, and the Japanese Record Academy Award. His most recent recording, released in March 2025, is of the Second Symphonies by Eastman and Tchaikovsky. Among his many distinctions, Welser-Möst is an Honorary Member of the Vienna Singverein and a recipient of the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art and the Kennedy Center Gold Medal of the Arts; he received the Festival Pin with Ruby from Salzburg in 2020, and, in 2021, the Austrian Music Theater Prize for his conducting of Elektra. His 2020 book Als ich die Stille fand (When I Found Silence) makes “a plea against the noise of the world.”

Lucerne Festival (IMF) debut on 26. March 1999 conducting the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony.

March 2025